Histories

Further, as the Babylonians, fearing for their food, had strangled their own women, as I described above, Darius provided wives to give them a posterity by appointing that each of the neighboring nations should send a certain number of women to Babylon [44.4,32.55] (deserted settlement), Babil, Iraq, AsiaBabylon; the sum of the women thus collected was fifty thousand: these were the mothers of those who now inhabit the city.